Land-based plants—including the fruits and vegetables in your kitchen—produce and respond to hormones in order to survive. Scientists once believed that hormone signaling machinery only existed in these relatively complex ...

(Phys.org) —As humanity faces more mouths to feed thanks to a swelling global population, new research has taken a step toward employing genes from blue-green algae to improve staple crop photosynthesis – a potential ...

Coconut dust may not be fairy dust, but in southern India, the substance is creating healthy crops. A Virginia Tech-led program is showing farmers that the material, derived from husks, is great potting soil for seedlings. ...

For the ancient ancestors of plants and animals, a partnership with other microbes was once formed during an endosymbiotic event to give rise to eukaryotes. Plants and animals, over billions of years of trial and error, made ...

Light-gathering macromolecules in plant cells transfer energy by taking advantage of molecular vibrations whose physical descriptions have no equivalents in classical physics, according to the first unambiguous theoretical ...

In most animals, taste has evolved to avoid all things bitter—-a key to survival—- to avoid eating something that could be poisonous via taste receptors, known as Tas2r, that quickly spring into action and elicit the ...